A Socio-Legal Analysis of GaniFawehinmi’s Human Rights Praxis

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By  Prof Obiora Okafor

This paper is to assess  systematically, the human rights praxis (the theory-informed human rights practice) of the late GaniFawehinmi, one of Nigeria's – and indeed one of the World's – most cerebral, dogged, accomplished, and thus celebrated, human rights lawyer/activist.

The idea here is to train a scholarly searchlight on the character, attainments and limitations of this iconic figure's human rights praxis, while conceptually situating that praxis in the broader contexts of both Nigerian and global human rights discourse and experience.

How precisely did GaniFawehinmi(hereafter referred to by his virtual nomdeguerre"Gani") go about doing his human rights work? What exactly, if any,are his value-added contributions to the advancement of the cause of human rights in Nigeria (and beyond)? What were the limitations, if any, of his preferred approaches to human rights activism? And in what ways, if at all, did his human rights praxis conform with or depart from the dominant approaches to human rights activism within and without Nigeria?

A key conceptual and methodological point that should be noted at the outset is that the goal of this paper is not to analyze the entire body of work that Gani produced as a lawyer andsocio-political activist. That very massive undertaking is way beyond the scope of a paper such as this.

The focus here is squarely on his body of human rights work. An even then, only a representative sample of that segment of his body of work(gathered via the purposive sampling method) is analyzed here.The vastness of the terrain to be covered were every single aspect of his human rights work to be collected and reviewed, and the space constraints that inevitably define a paper such as this,necessitated the adoption of the sampling method.

In a similar methodological vein, it should also be pointed out that since, even upon cursory examination, Gani's body of human rights work appears tohave transcended the narrow confines of the legal, and did in fact include the political and the social,the analysis undertaken here had totake on that the same colour.

Accordingly, the range of efforts that Gani made to advance the human rights of Nigerians is treated in this paper in a more or less trans-disciplinary way. Thismeans that Gani's work in the fields of law, politics, and social relations are viewed as intertwined, interconnected, interdependent, and often symbiotic, and are not treated or analyzedas separate spheresof activity or silos.It is for this reason that the analysis undertaken in the paper isproperly viewed as of "socio-legal"or "law-in-society" character.

As importantly, given that one of thekey overarching concerns of the enquiry that is conducted in this paper is the extent to which Gani'sotherwise much celebrated human rights praxis wasneverthelessriven by the very same kinds of"immanent dualities" that appear to have historically characterized virtually all manifestations of human rights praxisthe world over(what I have referred to elsewhere as "the dualistic deep structure of the [human rights] discipline")the concept of immanent duality as it applies to human rights does require some explanation in this introductory section.

The expression"the immanent dualities of human rights" or the phrase"its dualistic deep structure"refers to the fact that throughout recorded human history human wrongs have always been the flip side of the human rights coin, and vice versa.

Human wrongs and human rights have always been joined at the hip, one with the other. As such, at no time in human history has a human rights heaven existed. Rather, what we have always had are human rights worlds: which are places of imperfection, of good and evil, of contradictions, of dualities.

For, throughout the history of human society, the enjoyment of human rights for some has always existed side by side with, and has always in fact entailed, the violation of the human rights of some others. For e.g., as I have argued elsewhere, "The American Declaration of Independence loftily proclaimed that all humans were born free and should remain so while slavery remained conceptually legitimized in the praxis of the very drafters of that document and went on largely unhindered for over a century afterward (Morgan, 1972)."

And the high quality of life enjoyed by the great thinkers of any society, whether within the four walls of the ancient university at Timbuktu, or in the Roman Curia, has always come at the price of the displacement suffering to the hewers of wood and fetchers of water whose grinding toiling existence allowed these thinkers the free time and full bellies usually necessary for meaningful reflection.

Even in the most human rights friendly societies of our time, significant rights violations and displacements of suffering from one segment of society to another  (the "other") do occur on a daily basis. Indeed, in the real world, in the living human rights law (which is human rights law as it is actually experienced by real people and not the human rights that exist in the texts of constitutions, statutes, and treaties), the enjoyment of certain human rights almost always requires the deprivation however minor in extent of certain rights from others.

Your freedom of expression is for some others a deprivation of their right to privacy or right to dignity or freedom from racist discrimination. The difference between eras and between societies has always been relative: i.e. how extensive the zone of violation is in one era or in a specific society, relative to the zone occupied by violations, and compared to other eras and societies.

And so the question raised by the phenomenon of the existence of such "immanent dualities" iswhether, just like human rights praxis itself, Ganiwas at one and the very same time a defender of human rights and a perpetrator of human wrongs? And whether this matters in any way?

Vanguard Nigeria

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